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A field journal for solo publishers

What works.
What ranks.
What earns.

Multi-channel growth tactics for small online publishers — SEO, AI Search, social, paid, and owned audience. Tested across a real portfolio of sites, written up the way I'd actually want to read it.

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Currently tracking

Live across the portfolio.

Every dot is a city with someone reading one of the five sites in the last 30 minutes.

  • PhotoWorkout
  • Mappr
  • RankingHacks
  • SampleShots
  • AirportRoutes
April 2026 · channel growth

What grew last month.

Top traffic sources across the portfolio for April 2026, ranked by year-over-year delta. Numbers from a self-hosted Plausible. Direct traffic excluded — channels only.

  • 1Google111,432 visitors↑29%
  • 2DuckDuckGo22,474 visitors↑100%
  • 3AIChatGPT9,501 visitors↑476%
  • 4Bing18,560 visitors↑36%
  • 5Brave1,526 visitorsNEW
  • 6Ecosia1,403 visitors↑103%
  • 7Yahoo!5,367 visitors↑15%
  • 8AIcopilot.com491 visitorsNEW
The spine

Five channels. One playbook each.

Every post on RankingHacks fits into one of these channels. The thesis: a solo publisher in 2026 should pick three of these well, not all five poorly.

Beta build · May 2026

This is the work-in-progress.

The production site at rankinghacks.com still serves the live archive. This beta is where the new editorial system, the channel hubs, and the migrated framework posts come together. When it's ready, the cutover happens at the DNS layer — same URLs, new everything underneath.